She wants to be fooled, toyed with under the mask of seduction.
She wants to feel crushed, owned, herded like cattle, then released for a few minutes into the village pond or thicket and told, “There-that’s freedom.”
A plain man like me never learned the rules.
She became everyone’s, never mine. She chose whoever she wanted-never me.
We’re all alone in this world.
Yet the ones wrapped in mothers, sisters, girlfriends, cousins, exes, aunts, neighbour women, private whores, and mistresses are only waiting for their chance to play the same game.
I’m the one actually looking for love.
I don’t even have a dog, a cat, a housefly, a lizard, or a single plant to keep me company.
By half my age, other men already held PhDs in “being men,” women in “being women,” topping every class society ever taught.
I never found the admission gate. I’m principal in every other college of life, but in this one I never reached kindergarten.
I don’t know how to package myself into what she might want, how to guess and transform on command.
I just arrive-naked of tricks, missing most bells and whistles.
So instead of curling into my lap, she learns fast to dance on my head-or, in some cases, fears I’ll run off with her ass and never return it, which is the exact opposite of who I am.
Madonna on the pedestal, whore in the gutter-my mind splits women in two and loves neither right.
I have the Madonna–Whore complex.
In Indian homes, the mother and sister are goddesses in the living room; the wife disappears before the children, meeting her husband only behind the locked bedroom door.
Outside that door is sacred ground-no touch, no flirtation, no bargaining.
A son raised in that world walks into society unprepared.
Facing girls, my emotional intelligence freezes-unable to trade, unable to flirt, unable to play the game everyone else learned by experience and instinct. No sophistication at all.
My mother and father weren’t lovey-dovey, even less affectionate than the average Indian couple. They weren’t worldly-wise, and they kept my head buried inside books all the time. I saw only their fights, not the machinery by which they solved them.
Then someone struck a match on the old anger inside me-the same blaze and shame that once turned the teenage me into Ronie the reckless skeleton, furious with Ghostbusters fire.
This time it forged me into Ronie Dinosaur: mountain-sized, armoured in scars, roaring through the city, built for wreckage, impossible to love, impossible to ignore.
I call it Abnormally Extreme (Mature) Performance Disorder.
From ferocious kite flyer
to school topper,
to colony ruffian,
from Ronie the engineering prodigy
to self-made businessman,
from philosopher
to iron-forged bodybuilder,
from dutiful son
to hopeless man in a rehabilitation ward-
in these forty years
I have lived more lifetimes
than most are granted in one.
I never had a girlfriend.
I am Ronie Dinosaur.
I have lost more
than what could slip through two hands.
Desires kept me running after them,
and hard work remained the pursuit.
Difficult tasks came easily;
the simplest paths tangled forever out of reach.
